Love, LOVE, L*O*V*E* our friend Fri over at Wedding Nouveau! While she recently changed the storefront of her website/blog, her style, class, and personality continue to shine through! She’s on the cutting edge is always sending us great things to share with you! Here is a fabulous find from Wedding Nouveau, featuring a Brooklyn based Invitation specialist, Melinda Morris, co-owner with her husband David, or Lion in the Sun. After leaving the non-profit organization world, Melinda rejoined her family business with a 25 year history serving brides, mom’s to be, and anyone looking for beautiful and unique invitations. As a letter-pressing connoisseur, Melinda offers some helpful tips on the art & etiquette of intercultural stationary.

It doesn’t matter where you’re from, the marriage of two cultures is often a delicate balance of creativity, charisma  and courtesy.

Adopting the three C’s mentioned above, when picking the perfect invitation set will be no easy decision, but I’ve enlisted the help of paperie professional to help guide your process.

LOVE ME IN MANY CULTURES

Melinda offered her Top five ways on how to infuse cultural diversity and heritage into invitation design, using language, an important arsenal in her vault of ideas
1. Using two (or often 3) languages is a great way to honor everyone’s heritages – and of course insures that everyone can read the invite and feel included.
2. Imagery – choosing icon imagery from each culture and incorporating both into the design is a great way to show this fusion.  (Ex: Big Ben and the Taj Mahal, or a cherry blossom and a lotus flower)
3. Wording cultural difference in the language and layout of the invitations can be significant as well. Perhaps incorporating these traditional elements is another way to share cultural references.
4. Colors – Culturally, wedding colors vary greatly. By incorporating traditional colors into your wedding you automatically set a important
cultural tone. ( Ex: red and gold for Chinese weddings)
5. Pattern – Representing patterns that are distinctly cultural like tartan and Thai silk, or rice paper. Combing these patterns in elements of
your invites speaks volumes without saying a word.

LOVE ME IN MANY LANGUAGES

Here a few more eye catchy styles from Lion in the Sun.  These don’t even begin to cover the wide range of style options from weddings, to baby showers, Bar Mitzvahs and every excuse to be quite fabulous.

“Beautiful and creative invitations set the tone for your day and get your guests excited in anticipation of the great day you have in store.  It is a keepsake that will be held and looked at an admired much more than anything else in your wedding both before and long after.”

- Melinda Morris, Fine Stationery Designer -

Thanks again Fri for all your fabulous additions to the Cultural Couture!!